Chinadaily is reporting that there are 83 generations of Confucius’ offspring, comprising over 2 million people. The current family tree is 43,000 pages long and takes up 80 books. Thanks to digitization, this unwieldy collection is now manageable.
The Newspaper said: “The digital version has embedded search bars, diagrams, and analytical functions that can swiftly sort out demographic and other statistical information,” said Kong Deyong, a 77th-generation descendant of Confucius, also surnamed Kong, and chief compiler of the great thinker’s genealogy books.”
“Editors can make changes on a computer and then send the updated packages to users via the Internet,” he said. “It also ensures that the family tree will always be up-to-date.”
All nine versions of the historical revisions will be digitized, and customized versions for the family’s descendants in Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Republic of Korea and Japan will also be released, Kong said.
Programmers have designed a tree-shaped viewing system for the program, said Wei Jie, who is heading the digitization.
Enter a name in the search bar and you can get the complete hierarchy of the family tree with only one click,” he said. “It takes only a second to identify a Kong-surnamed person’s immediate family members, as well as their extended family and location.”
